Download PDF of this full issue: v19n1.pdf (9.7 MB)

Agent Orange: In Another "Vietnam"

By Barry Romo

With much fanfare, Vietnam veterans and their families in 1984 supposedly won $180 million in compensation from the six chemical companies who produced Agent Orange, the poisonous defoliant, for military use in Vietnam.

More than 20,000 vets are affected. So far they have yet to see a penny, even though the pretrial settlement was the largest class action settlement at that time and was seen as tacit admission about the defoliant's dreadful human consequences. Only the lawyers have been paid—to the tune of $50 million.

Why the nearly four-year delay? One explanation for the official foot dragging is that the military wants to use this poison again. According to the Feb. 25 Wisconsin State Journal, the Air Force announced on the day of the settlement that the use of Agent Orange and other defoliants would not be affected by the chemical companies; concession. Air Force Deputy Surgeon General Murphy A. Chesney said he "would be confident about using Agent Orange in another war." Thus not only was there nothing wrong in using dioxin-based chemicals in Vietnam, this suggests that defoliants have a great military future for operations in Central America.

Lest it be forgot: Agent Orange is one of the most deadly of all man-made chemicals. The side effects are spontaneous abortions, miscarriages, birth defects, cancer, liver damage and more. Agent Orange was not primarily a "weedkiller" used for jungle "deforestization." Rather its purpose was to destroy crops in guerrilla-controlled provinces. This denied "the enemy" food and forced the civilian population into government-controlled camps. I visited Vietnam last year and saw how Agent Orange continues taking a toll on ordinary people through rare cancers, birth defects and other diseases.

Most veterans here merely saw the Air Force statements as clap-trap evading responsibility for GI disabilities. Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot more to the story. Word is now reaching the U.S. from refugee camps in Mexico of aerial spraying in Guatemala. While the U.S. says it is destroying marijuana, the defoliation is taking place in zones with rebel activity and over the protests of Guatemala's congress. The Mexican newspaper Excelsior carries a June 24, 1987 Infoprensa report claiming U.S. aerial spraying in Guatemala killed 14 peasants and inflicted wide crop damage. Long one of the most brutal guerrilla wars in Central America, Guatemalan Indians must now apparently suffer chemical warfare as well as massacres. In El Salvador, too, the military is reported to be using chemicals killing crops and cattle in rebel-controlled areas, according to May, 1987 reports in Excelsior.

We know the carte blanche for covert wars given to Reagan's CIA. Still even the thought that the president has resurrected the use of defoliants banned since Nixon is abhorrent.

The rashes leading to deformed children are all too familiar to those of us acquainted with Agent Orange. As a Vietnam veteran with minimal problems due to dioxin poisoning, the thought of any child dying or suffering defects because of its reintroduction in a "Second Vietnam" holds only shame for all Americans. Let's not worry so much about building pretty monuments to Vietnam veterans, but work to solve real problems and prevent new outrages in the potential Vietnams of the future. That would be the best monument of all.

—Barry Romo